II. There seems to be no general agreement of opinion upon the origin of funeral rites, and the variety of ways, in which they were performed. The Egyptians EMBALMED, and most of the Greeks BURNED the bodies of the dead before they committed them to the grave. Cicero, in the 22d chapter of his second Book on Laws, speaks of the interment alone, which is now in use, as the most ancient method, and that, which is most congenial to nature, and in this he is followed by Pliny. Some think that men paid it as a VOLUNTARY debt of nature, which they knew that, AT ANY RATE, they would be obliged to discharge. For the divine sentence, that the body should return to the dust, from which it was taken, was not passed upon Adam only, but, as we find it acknowledged by the writings of Greece and Rome, extended to the whole human race. Cicero, from the Hypsipyle of Euripides, says, "Earth must be returned to earth," and in the twelfth chapter of Solomon's Ecclesiastes, there is a passage to the same purport, that "the dust shall return to the earth as it was, but the spirit to God, who gave it." Euripides has enlarged on this subject in the character of Theseus in his Suppliants, "Suffer the dead to be laid in the lap of the earth; for every thing returns to its original state, the spirit to heaven, and the body to the earth: Neither of them is given in plenary possession, but only for a short use: The earth soon demands back the bodies, to which she had given birth and nourishment." In the same manner Lucretius calls the earth "a prolific parent and a common grave." Pliny also describes the earth, as receiving us at our birth, cherishing our growth, supporting us to the very last, and, when all the other parts of nature have forsaken us, taking us to her maternal bosom, and covering us with a mantle. There are some, who think that the custom of burial was bequeathed to us by our first parents as a testamentary hope of a resurrection. For we are instructed by Democritus to believe, that our bodies are preserved in the earth under the promise of a restoration to life. And Christians in particular have frequently ascribed the custom of decent burial to the same hope. Prudentius a Christian poet says, "What can be the meaning of hallowed rocks, or splendid monuments, except that they are the depositories of bodies, consigned not to death, but to a temporary sleep?"